The answer is easy, but it's unsatisfying: it's in the interests of proprietary vendors to make perfect compatibility as hard as they can get away with, because it makes them more money.) But asking why can't we have perfect compatibility is the wrong question. If there were a single FAQ file for people wanting to switch away from proprietary software, this would be the answer: You may be perfectly happy with your old version, but people will start sending you files from newer versions, and oft you won't be able to open them, so you end up having to update just for a quiet life. This is why many software vendors regularly change their file formats, but ensure that the new product can import the old product's file, often with a scary warning. None of the significant ones even come with an email client or anything like one. I started to explain that no free office suite can do this. As a result, they asked about free office suites.īut they had some stipulations: it had to open all their existing documents with perfect fidelity, and it had to have an email client that would import Outlook. That in turn updated Microsoft Office, and that broke it in some way. It happened, yet again, very recently, when an acquaintance of mine updated their computer. I regularly get asked, by both friends and acquaintances, and in my former life as a tech consultant, about switching office software. This is a big deal, and it comes up more often than you'd think. If there's a bug or a vulnerability, I can get a new version from each app's creators, quickly, without waiting for a big vendor to patch or update its products. I don't have to worry about moving apps between platforms or formats: I use the same set of apps on all three, so no conversion is necessary. It lets me run the same set of apps on macOS, and on Linux, and on Windows when I have to. For me, this has several benefits for me. I put different, mostly FOSS apps on it instead.Īgain, this all about convenience. I don't use Apple's email client, or its browser, or its cloud storage, or its productivity apps. The thing that puzzles Mac OS X-era owners is that I use almost none of the perfectly good software my iMac came bundled with.
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February 2023
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